Visual Effects Supervisor: Dennis Berardi Digital Effects Supervisor: Aaron Weintraub Director: Robert Ben Garant Feature Film: Balls of Fury Client: Mr X You may be forgiven for thinking that MrX Inc is the bizarre corporatization of protected witnesses in sensitive court cases. You would however be mistaken. MrX Inc is in fact a dynamic, Toronto based Visual Effects Post facility responsible for making Dan Fogler and Maggie Q look like the most talented table-tennis players on earth, in the new comedy feature from Rogue Pictures, Balls of Fury. MrX achieved this by virtue of almost 200 separate visual effects shots featuring composited photoreal digital ping-pong balls into shots of actors miming the action entirely without balls. A tricky job from any angle, but executed with exacting precision with the help of The Pixel Farm’s uniquely versatile match-moving package, PFTrack. Digital Effects Supervisor at MrX Inc, Aaron Weintraub comments, “On Balls of Fury, we used PFTrack on every shot that featured digital ping-pong balls”, which meant “it was possible to create solid tracks in hours on sequences that could otherwise have taken 3 or 4 days to successfully track”. The movie demanded so many FX shots featuring Ping-Pong balls because the story pays homage to those 1970’s Kung-Fu films where the fallen hero redeems himself by triumphing over the baddie in a showdown martial arts mêlée, except that Ping-Pong replaces the Kung Fu. So with tongue thrust firmly in cheek we are taken on a journey into the dangerous world of the slightly deranged but flamboyantly clad, evil mastermind, Master Feng (Christopher Walken) and the dark underbelly of the perilous pastime that is extreme Ping-Pong. Or as the Chinese say, Ping-Pong. The unlikely hero is a very podgy Randy Daytona (Dan Fogler). Once a Ping-Pong Olympian he is now reduced to performing tricks with the little balls as part of novelty cabaret act, complete with a Glam-Rock hairstyle. But the hero’s journey begins when he is approached by an FBI agent (George Lopez) and challenged to get back on form to compete in one of Master Feng’s devilish Ping-Pong death matches, so that Feng might be captured and brought to justice. Oriental Ping-Pong ace, Maggie (Maggie Q) helps whip Randy back into some sort of shape, and then the balls really start to fly. No Balls! Understandably, key to this project was getting the look of the animation right, to simulate fast moving semi translucent balls to interact with not only live action but live actors too. “The joke around the studio was that you would just click ‘Create-Primitive-Sphere’ and then the modelling would be done”, says Weintraub. Obviously it wasn’t that simple. The writers/directors, Ben Garant and Tom Lennon had some very specific ideas for the ball’s movement in each scene which was useful direction, but in addition, endless footage of professional table-tennis matches were studied to learn the subtleties of appearance of in-flight balls. “Because Ping-Pong balls are so light, the angle of incidence is not the determining factor. The physics of the motion needed to appear realistic, and the balls needed to look perfect, as though we had shot them for real”. Modelled, textured and animated in Maya and rendered using Renderman the look of the balls’ performance still depended on seamless accurate composits which is where the broad functionality of PFTrack came into it’s own. Balls! PFTrack includes a number of additional, powerful functions beyond mere match-moving which can be used as very useful assists all along the VFX pipeline. Taking advantage of these, Lead matchmover Jason Edwardh and his team used PFTrack for a number of different jobs. “We use PFTrack in a two stepped approach. The first step is to remove any significant radial lens distortion by creating new plates with PFTrack’s Lens Distortion Tool. This allows us to easily create rock solid tracks in hours rather than days, and takes care of 80 to 90% of our tracking work. The rest of the shots can be tackled using manual user features’. Even here when placing manual features PFTrack takes the labour out of the task. Dan Carnegie, matchmover and animator at MrX Inc gives an example, “On Balls Of Fury, the most difficult tracks were the bullet time shots that rotated 360 degrees completely around the ping pong tables. Because of the lack of tracking markers and amount of blur in the shots, we resorted to hand tracking through these areas frame by frame with User Features. With PFTrack's fast interface it was actually quite easy to go through and hand place 2D tracking markers in the blurry sections to get a complete solve.  Had we used any other tracking packages, this would have been a very slow and time consuming process”. PFTrack performs several tasks, which can be very useful to a VFX team, such as a built in image modelling tools, where models can be quickly made and rendered using texture from the native plate, and a very versatile but easy to use geometry tracking facility. Models or primitive shapes can be either created within the application or imported, and matched to the plate for incredibly accurate results. No Balls! Matt Ralph, matchmover and animator explains how PFTrack rescued a near impossible shot. “There was a shot in Balls of Fury where Randy and his opponent were having a really fierce rally. We needed to animate a CG ping-pong ball bouncing between the players, and track in the table for contact shadows. When we first saw the raw footage, we knew it was going to be a challenge. The camera dollied and panned almost 180 degrees, the background was out of focus, the characters were bouncing around in the frame, and there were no tracking markers. The only thing we could really track was the ping-pong table, and even that was troublesome since it was a very smooth surface with no real contrast in the paint. We used PFTrack's geometry tracking to lock down a model of the ping-pong table which we then used to help solve the camera. Where normal camera tracking alone couldn't solve the shot, PFTrack's geometry tracking tool really helped to save the day”. Balls! These extra assistive functions PFTrack comes armed with have also been used on another recent project at MrX Inc, Resident Evil: Extinction for set extensions, crowd simulations, creature composits and many other effects of over 500 which MrX completed. Aaron Weintraub, Digital Effects Supervisor outlines some details. “On Resident, we used PFTrack on every moving shot that had some kind of CG composited into it. For example the opening sequence of the film right before the main title where we pull out through successive helicopter shots in the desert had crowds of over 10000 undead tracked into them.  Also, when Alice and her convoy shows up in Las Vegas, we used PFTrack to solve the cameras for the shots where we added CG hotels and other set pieces, including a miniature motion control shot of the entire Vegas strip”. Having found PFTrack immensely useful on recent projects, why does matchmoving lead, Jason Edwardh think PFTrack is such a must have bit of kit? “Documentation is concise, thorough and clean. PFTrack just works. For the price it can’t be beat. The tool set is solid, robust and fast. The workflow is logical and simple. It can tackle anything we throw at it”. Quite so. To see the "Balls Of Fury" trailer click here. www.mrxfx.com What else have they been doing? We’ve also recently completed “Shoot 'Em Up”, David Cronenberg's "Eastern Promises", Ang Lee's "Lust, Caution”, and “The Seeker: The Dark is Rising”.  We're in post right now on “Whiteout” and “The Rocker”, and we are currently shooting our next two projects, “Death Race” and “The Repossession Mambo”. Words: Martin Southwood